It is our last full day here, and tomorrow I have a 6 AM flight. Which is stupid, but here we are.
We got up a little early today to make time to pack and laze about the apartment one final time before moving to the airport hotel. Public transit runs 24 hours a day, but I'd rather just stumble through a terminal than drag suitcases through cobblestone streets and ride the subway that early in the morning. We finished off the last of the coffee and pastries and headed to the hotel. Fortunately, our room was ready well ahead of official check in time, so we parked our luggage and spent a short time in the lobby plotting our last day from the egg chairs in the lobby.
While we've been mostly on foot for the trip so far, we picked up 24 hour passes for today as we'll be in very different parts of town. From the airport, we took the metro to Øresund St. and headed to Wulff & Konstali, a small cafe that does brunch all day. It was packed a little before 11 on this Friday. They do a build-a-brunch where you select 5 to 7 courses from a set list of small plate options. We split 7 courses and found a picnic table in the shade across the street.
Light lunch consumed, we walked into a more industrial part of town to find Copenhagen Distillery. The website said they were open from 12-4 on Fridays, but what that meant was an open question. Last night, the bar tender, unsure they were open to the public at all, had texted an employee for clarification, but received no response. Once we found our way into the fenced off row of warehouses containing the distillery, we found a small crowd seated at tables outside, but they were part of some sports based celebration and not the distillery. So we walked up to the most likely door and Bill tugged on the handle, which opened to reveal a large warehouse space with a small bar, a corner full of equipment and handful of workers.
The sales manager greeted us immediately and assured us they were indeed open to the public and then gave us one of the best tours of a distillery we've had to date. While the owner was in a meeting, the rest of the staff was there and eager to talk to us about their process, their products, and our own prior experience not opening a distillery.
They'd only recently moved to this location, having run out of room in the historic building they originally opened in. A new, larger still is on order, which will greatly enhance their capacity. They currently have a small R&D still and something closer to a 50 gallon still for production. They don't ferment on site, instead buying either NGS or distilling mead for their base spirits. Something we did not know when Bill and I engaged in the abridged version of our ongoing "grain vs. NGS as a starting point for distillation" argument in front of them. An argument they resolved by pointing out that the purity of NGS they can buy is quite high compared to what they can produce with such a small still, so from both a cost and quality standpoint NGS makes the most sense.
We also talked about the differences in botanicals added by maceration vs added through a basket in the still, the differences in final product driven by using fresh vs. dried ingredients, and the backgrounds of the distiller, owner, and sales manager prior to opening a distillery. Basically, it was a short overview of equipment followed by a long, rambling discussion of the details of spirits manufacturing.
And of course there was a tasting.
We tried their Dry Gin, which only uses juniper and gets the rest of it's flavor from distilled mead. It was a wonderfully clean, floral gin far more complex than expected from a single botanical. They also make an Orange Gin using fresh peels which has a smooth flavor and an unexpected viscosity in the mouth feel due to the inclusion of prunes. It won a gold medal at the 2017 Gin Masters competition.
We tried their Oak Gin that recently won Master Title at Gin Masters. The base is 75% orange gin (using fresh peels) and 25% the mead based gin. We also got a sample pour of the unaged version of this spirit as they had some waiting to go into a barrel. There was a large difference between the two, owing in part to the in house production of sherry casks for aging. They purchase new barrels and fill them with sherry to create these in house, avoiding any issues with contamination or provenance in their barrel supply.
We tried an Indonesian long pepper schnapps that was a bit of a childhood memory for me as the aroma was quite reminiscent of crab boils in the Chesapeake Bay and North Carolina areas. That is a positive comparison as far as I'm concerned.
They also make a dill forward aquavit, a Christmas schnapps with orange notes, a heavily caraway forward aquavit, and a coffee liquor. All were excellent.
Our last sample was a spirit developed for a sporting shop that includes deer blood in the ingredient list. It did not smell or taste like anything I've had before. Interesting, but not something I'd see myself drinking again.
Then we had the difficult task of selecting what we would buy, narrowing that down to only 5 bottles and a book about aquavit, signed by one of the co-authors who happens to work at the distillery. Copenhagen Distillery doesn't distribute to the US yet, but hopefully we'll be able to get them here soon.
After dropping the bottles off at the hotel, it was off to Duck and Cover via train and a short walk. We sat at the bar and told the bartender they had been recommended for aquavit based cocktails. He asked if going off menu would be okay since the current menu only had one aquavit cocktail. Of course that was alright. My first cocktail was a variation on a sour with aquavit and cucumber.
We also mentioned that we had been at Copenhagen Distillery earlier that day, and the bartender mentioned Empirical Spirits, the chef owned distillery in that same part of town. He then pulls out a few bottles from Empirical and a few bottles of Arcus Project N°1 Fourage, an unreleased series of spirits made from hyper local botanicals.
From Empircal, we tried the Douglas Fir, the Juniper, and the base spirit. Empirical uses a vacuum distillation process with a wash fermented from both grain and rice. The base spirit has a not quite floral note. The Douglas Fir tastes exactly as expected and the Juniper is interesting, but not as interesting as the Dry Gin we'd tried earlier. As single note, focused spirits, these are interesting as potential ingredients, but not really drinkable on their own.
The Fourage series are wild. Each bottle is labeled with a lat and long indicating where the ingredients were located. My favorite is the Sweden based one with honey and lingonberry, but all of these are interesting and well balanced.
After one last cocktail, we realized we were going to be late for our dinner reservation and headed towards Geist at a brisk pace arriving only a few minutes late. The menu looks great, but once it is clear to the server that we're not interested in more than a glass of wine, the service feels a little stilted. The food is good, though.
We were then quite ready to go to bed a bit early after a day of drinking and bellies full of hot, high fat food. All in all, a great day to end a trip on.
